We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

3rd reading; first read in the '60s.

I'm willing to bet that almost everyone who attended high school from the mid '50s on has read Shirley Jackson's 1949 short story "The Lottery." I know it was in my high school literature textbook, and it was still in the textbooks when I first taught in the '60s and when I returned to teaching in the '90s. I'll also be willing to bet that most who read it then can still remember it now, when much else has been forgotten.

This 1962 novel builds that same kind of tension and sense of dread, as the reader gradually realizes that something very bad is going to happen. This is a novel to be read twice: once to experience the impact and once to observe how skillfully Jackson introduces bits and pieces that hint that something very dark is going on which is outside the scope of the everyday experience of most people.

For example, here is the amazing first paragraph, which slyly and indirectly tells us so much:

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

Right away we know that the narrator must be what we might call "a little off." She is eighteen, yet sounds like a much younger person, although she is obviously not mentally challenged, knowing as she does both historical and scientific facts. She would consider it "luck" to be born a werewolf and twice mentions death. The most chilling phrase is "...I have had to be content with what I had." Instantly, we wonder, "So what does she have that would be just a step down from being a werewolf?"

As the plot develops, we gradually learn of the lives and history of the two sisters. They are isolated in their old mansion, with only Mary Katherine leaving to shop in the village twice a week. Soon we learn that Constance, the older one, who has been tried and acquited for the murder by arsenic poisoning of her mother, father, aunt, and brother, never leaves the grounds of the house. Their life of routine and restraint is guarded by Mary Katherine with little acts of sympathetic magic, such as nailing talismans to trees.

Then enters Cousin Charles, a formerly estranged kinsman, who Mary Katherine fears will upset everything. Events unforeseen yet seemingly inevitable upset the delicate balance of rationality that Constance has worked to maintain.

This is sometimes classified as a Gothic horror novel, but if so it is psychological horror, rather than horror of the supernatural. Mary Katherine's ritualistic magic has little to do with the developing action, except in her own mind. I am reminded so much of the Hitchcock movie Psycho, which had been released a few years earlier. There, too, tension was gradually built by subtle hints that the affable motel owner was not quite as harmless as he would seem.

Something I missed the first couple of times I read this novel: Constance, the rational sister, is perhaps not so normal as she would first appear to be.

I highly recommend this short novel, as well as Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.